Wikipedia: Northwest AngleInsufficient understanding of North American geography in the late 1700s resulted in the Treaty of Paris accidentally assigning a notch of land in Canada to the United States. These 600 square miles comprise the "Northwest Angle" in Minnesota, the northernmost point in the continental U.S. To get there, one must fly, drive through Canada, or take a boat across the Lake of the Woods. 152 people live there.

New York Times: Farmers Strain to Hire American Workers in Place of Migrant LaborIt turns out that if you don't hire immigrants then Americans will not, in fact, do the work. That's the experience of one Colorado farmer, who raised his wages to $10.50/hour. Only 2/3 as many people showed up as he normally gets, and most of them quit within the day. The work is just too hard. I don't want to harvest onions. Do you?

Bloomberg: Koch Brothers Flout Law With Secret Iran SalesThe Koch Brothers have secretly, criminally sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, an enemy of the United States with whom it is unquestionably illegal to do business. This is no aberration for these bastards—they're out for a buck, and they don't care how they get it.

Commonwealth Data Point: Expenditures by AgencyWondering what the state spends its money on? Here's the state's checkbook, by agency, so read to your heart's content. A warning: good luck with the weird menu system. Somebody apparently thought that rather than menu items, it would be fun to just give people a single letter to try to decipher. O? F? S? P? I don't get it.

Federal RegisterIf you haven't seen the website for the Federal Register in the past year, it's really a thing of beauty. Andrew Carpenter, Bob Burbach, and Dave Augustine put it together as an independent site, GovPulse,us, which the feds liked so much they asked the guys to take on the job of replacing federalregister.gov with what they'd put together for govpulse.us. It doesn't matter if you don't care about the Federal Register—the site makes it interesting to anybody.

Science Now: ‘Dinofuzz’ Found in Canadian AmberFeathers from Late Cretaceous dinosaurs, preserved in amber, are providing the first detailed look at how hair evolved into feathers. The 78-million-year-old feathers are really "dinofuzz"— not quite hair and not quite feathers. Eleven samples were found in all, and provide what seems like a great cross-sample of the varieties of dinofuzz in existence then.

Wikipedia: Avondale Mine DisasterOne hundred and ten workers died in this Pennsylvania mine fire in 1869. The mine owner wouldn't allow but one tunnel to be constructed, so when the fire started, anybody below that point in the mine was trapped and suffocated. The result was that the Pennsylvania General Assembly created the nation's first safety standards for coal mining.

Benjamin J. Balter: Analysis of Federal Executive .GovsThis grad student had the clever idea to take the OMB's list of all federal domain names and inventory them automatically. He cataloged whether the domain works, if it's running a web server, if they use a CDN, what CMS they use, and a few other bits of information. Interestingly, 29% of domains don't respond, only nine support IPv6, 13 are cloud-based, and Drupal is the most common CMS. Great stuff.

Wikipedia: Tsar BombaThe most powerful explosion ever created by man was "Tsar Bomba," the hydrogen bomb tested in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, in the Arctic Sea, north of Russia. The Soviet Union created this 100 megaton bomb, but realized that it would be so powerful as to be completely impractical, and cut it down to 50 megatons. The 1961 explosion was ten times more powerful than all explosives used in the whole of WWII. The heat would have caused third-degree burns in somebody 60 miles away from ground zero, and caused damage 600 miles away.

Physorg: Human precursors went to sea, team says130,000 year-old stone tools have been found on Crete. What with being an island, that means that hominids that predate homo sapiens managed to cross open water. That was an ability that researchers had long chalked up to being one of those things that makes us special, but it looks like that's not so. If this turns out to be true, it'll really shake up our collective understanding of early hominid history.

New York Times: Crashing the Tea PartyA Notre Dame political scientist and a Harvard professor of public policy (Robert Putnam, no less) have interviewed thousands of people to understand who comprises the Tea Party and what Americans think of them. The short version is that your average Tea Party member is a white, Republican, Christian, social conservative who doesn't like blacks or immigrants, and places a higher value on establishing an American theocracy than on reducing the size of government. Their values are almost entirely out of step with most Americans’. It is perhaps suitable, then, that public opinion of the Tea Party is awful. They're less popular than Republicans, Democrats, atheists, and—ironically—Muslims. On a related note, remember when the Tea Party pretended to be "nonpartisan"?

Library of Congress: Lincoln and Johnson PosterWhat strikes me about this 1864 Lincoln/Johnson campaign poster is that as much ink is used naming the electors as the candidates. Then, as now, we don't actually vote for president but, instead, we vote for a slate of electors who will represent our state in the Electoral College; it is those 538 people who actually vote for the president. These days, that's information that would surprise many people to learn, whereas in 1864, apparently it was just an accepted part of the electoral process.

The Washington Post: Fewer dinners mean meaner politicsSince Gingrich's cohort of Republicans came into office in 1994, there has been a steady decline in bipartisan socialization and, indeed, socialization at all. He exhorted freshmen to return to their districts whenever possible, to be in D.C. only when absolutely necessary. The result is a dangerous loss in bipartisanship. It's easy to see opposing opinions as evil if you don't actually know anybody who holds those opinions.

AP: Surry County to Open Poll for One VoterThere's just one guy in the 3rd Senate district in Surry County. State law requires that a polling place be open all day, staffed by three people. It'll cost $2,000. Bang-up job on redistricting, legislature. It's these little things that really show the attention to detail.

(Don’t understand this “API” business? Application programming interfaces (APIs) are how software talks to software, and they’re the underpinning of the modern web. For instance, post a comment here, WordPress submits your comment to Akismet, Akismet evaluates the comment to determine if it looks like spam, and returns a score that WordPress uses to decide whether your comment is published or held for me to review. And Richmond Sunlight’s API allows other websites to automatically retrieve information about legislators, the status of legislation, Photosynthesis portfolios, etc.)

What good does this do you right now? In all likelihood, none at all, unless you know what to do with and have some use for, say, JSON data for cases concerning § 20-107.3. It’s not until this API is pressed into service on other websites that it’ll be of value to virtually anybody. Maybe there’s no audience for this—maybe there are no programmers just waiting for some shiny new APIs, chock full of state government data. But we won’t know unless we create some APIs, will we?

IBM Many Bills: A Visual Bill ExplorerIBM is doing some really interesting work with legislation here. In my own work on Richmond Sunlight, I've long treated the text of the bill as a black box, doing very little with the text of bills. IBM demonstrates here that there's actually some valuable data to be gleaned from the actual words within the bill. Their interface is lousy—the site is hard to use—by I really admire their original thinking.

Wall Street Journal: Grandparents and Grandkids Connect Via Facebook, Twitter and TextingMy grandfather kept up with his grandchildren—and we kept up with him—via Facebook until shortly before his death last year. My grandmother had photos and status updates cherry-picked from Facebook and e-mailed to her—delivered via her HP Presto e-mail printer—until her death last month. Of course, the ability to assign grandparents (and grandchildren) to a specific group to limit access is helpful, too—kids need not share everything with their elders.

Snopes: Obama Lends $2 Billion to Brazilian Oil CompanyHeard the one about how the President Obama is spending billions on offshore drilling…in Brazil? Snopes rates it “mostly false.” This is another case of conservatives getting riled up about something that's not true and dates from President Bush's time in the White House.

NASA: Results of Epic Space-Time ExperimentI love theoretical physics. Albert Einstein came up with all of these ideas about how space and time should work, based solely on doing math on paper, and as science catches up with him, we keep finding that he's right. In this case, Einstein forecast that mass should curve spacetime. For instance, the mass of Earth should cause the very fabric of the universe to twist and warp around it. By launching some gyroscopes into space seven years ago—containing the most perfect spheres ever made—and observing how their spin drifts, it was observed that Einstein's calculations were spot-on. NASA's work on the project began 47 years ago, culminating in this magnificent confirmation of how the universe works.